Bitcoin Forum

New to Bit Coin and trying to wrap my hands around the fee structure.  An internet post, about a year old said 0.2 mBTC.  I searched the internet and nothing makes sense.  I looking into setting up an account to fund my on line poker account.

What is the fee for transferring $500 US dollars?

Thanks

There is no flat fee. What you're paying depend on:

1. The network and whether it's congested or not.
2. The size of your transaction.

To simplify things, if you haven't been receiving multiple small inputs, your transaction size shouldn't be big and you'll only be paying a very small amount  (https://bitcoinfees.info/)(with the network's current state); that clearly doesn't include any deposit fees the poker site might take.

One of the innovative ideas with Bitcoin is that you get to decide how much you want to pay in fees. Miners choose which transactions they want to prioritize when processing transactions, so obviously they will take the transactions with the higher fees since they get the fees as a reward. So depending on how quick you need your transaction to be confirmed, you can decide how much to pay in fees.

If you need your transaction to go through immediately, you can look at the current fees being paid by other people and make your transaction's fee a little higher than average. If you don't care about speed you can technically even do a transaction with zero fees, or just a very small fee, and it should eventually make it through but it could take awhile.

Most wallet apps you use will try to estimate the best fee for you to include with your transaction, so a lot of ppl just use the default estimated fee instead of entering their own. Or some wallets will have something that says like "pay X to get it confirmed in 10 minutes, pay Y to get it confirmed in 1 hour".

The fee has nothing to do with the amount of the transaction's value. A 1 billion dollar transaction can use the same fee as a 1 cent transaction.

Also just to add to OmegaStarScream's reply - most wallets show how much fee you are going to pay before sending the transaction. Nowadays it shouldn't be more than $1-2 bucks MAXIMUM when the network is congested(as far as I have experienced) - usually is just a few cents per transaction, but depends on how many blocks you want the transactions to arrive(tx speed).

It may worth also mentioning that if your transaction is a withdrawal from an exchange then you'll pay a flat fee imposed by the exchange (usually bigger than a normal transaction from a proper wallet).

You should mention the name of the site. It will be easy for us to help. I think the fee will not be longer than 0.0005 BTC If you are transferring from an external wallet.

For any Bitcoin payment you will need to ensure that you are sending along with the fees or else it will be depend from the sending amount what you are planning to send.
Particularly to speak about the every wallet providers will have different kind of fee structure to send the Bitcoin to other wallet. So no one can ask you that which is the exact value as a fee.

as others have said or implied, there's a bunch of details here that effect this.

there's the bitcoin network itself, which has fees varying as mario described.

then there's fees the poker site itself might charge to deposit.

then there's where ever you got the bitcoin in the first place. let's say coinbase, an exchange for trading one currency, say US dollars, for another, say, bitcoin.

what'll happen is this - you'll deposit money into your account on the exchange - likely incurring a fee from your bank and a fee from their bank.

then you'll trade the US Dollars for BTC - possibly another fee here.

then yu'll withdraw the BTC from the exchange - another fee - and send it to your poker site - here's where the bitcoin network itself comes in with it's fee.

then your BTC is deposited at your poker site and you're able to play as you please.

all told, it shouldn't cost very much - in a crazy horrible "everyone is charging huge fees" scenario you might be looking at 25 bucks or something, on a guess.

also, just case it needs to be said - if you are gambling as an american citizen on a website... it's almost certainly illegal at the federal level. choose wisely, or at least don't get caught.

depend you have a choice if you want much faster you will need to pay much higher fees, but i suggest choose the normal fees.  There is an option how much you want to pay for the fees the option depend on you if you want it faster or not.

Technically, it depends if you have that $500 on your wallet or it's on the exchange site since they offer a flat fee whatever amount you'll transfer. So it would be better if you provide where you store your bitcoin so we can give you exact answers.

But then, fee and confirmation still depend on the congestion of the mempool so try to consider those.

Each transaction occupies a certain space on the blockchain, the ledger that's distributed across nodes in the Bitcoin network. The more space you occupy, the higher fees you pay. The faster people want to get into that ledger, the higher fees they pay to get into that ledger. thereby, Fees aren't determined. you can select any fee you want and a miner can choose to include any transaction they want. Block space will always be a limited resource with competition for inclusion.

if you want to transfer using a blockchain wallet I think you will find an easy option for you to transfer your bitcoin, there also you can find options for cost, regular or priority, for even cheaper you can do manual settings, but recommend using regular, if you use a blockchain wallet, even if you don't use it, it seems like in any bitcoin wallet there is a fee setting if I'm not mistaken, if you hesitate you can send a bit of bitcoin then you can send all your funds, usually to prevent your first mistake

It looks like the fees charged by the exchange when making a withdrawal, it is not a transaction fee but it is a withdrawal fee which has been accumulated with transaction fees. Indeed, on average all exchanges provide a flat fee for each coin withdrawal and the fees also vary.

Which exchanger you are using? It depends on exchanger. Few exchanger ask for 0.0005btc and few ask for 0.0012btc. If you are holding your btc in personal wallet like electrum or bitcoin core.Then you can increase or decrease your trx fee.           

I think based on my own experience, every transaction has a fee. One of the reasons why it has fees is because we need the network and it is not cheap to maintain networks. The fee also depends on speed. It is up to you if you want your transaction to be processed immediately then you need to pay for a higher fee.

There are some services like https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ who help you to calculate the right fees for your transactions. If the transactions have lots of inputs and outputs that will make from it a big transaction with bigger fees, but if you only have 1 input and one output the right fees for today are 22 satoshis/byte.

This is something that is generally very difficult to explain to someone who is a beginner, but I think it is a very important step in mastering the basic material. How many times have we heard someone complain that he paid a very large amount of the fee and eventually concluded that Bitcoin is actually too expensive for transactions? Too many times if you ask me, all because of unfamiliarity with the basics.

Accumulated dust transactions sometimes have such a high fee that the user has the problem of sending the transaction at all, but some wise guys even today advise people to make just such payments because they have no idea what they are really talking about or they don’t really care. In the end "Bitcoin is bad technology" just because some don't know how to use it.

By the way, I made one pretty big transaction today and only paid 16 satoshis/byte which was only 3568 satoshis, but only because I wanted confirmation in the next block.

There's no bitcoin transactions can be confirmed immediately, even we pay a high amount of money we need to wait for the next block to be confirmed in probably just 10 mins according to the blockchain network right now, but as you said the highest fees you're paying the faster that your transaction be confirmed, everyone can check this site https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ if they really care about their transactions rapidity to be confirmed.

I agree, the transaction fee of all the exchanges when you are withdrawing bitcoin pumped up very high than before, that is why I can't help it but to convert it in Ethereum  so that I could lessen the fee, which is only a dollar compare to bitcoin that cost $4-$8, if I am not mistaken. High transaction fees in withdrawal is indeed fast but it would be great if all of the exchanges will offer options for us regarding about the transaction fee in the withdrawal process, since not all of us need that money instantly, I am willing to wait just to save couple of bucks.

I want to thank everyone for their comments on this.  It's more complicated than I thought, however it's little more clear now thanks to all the experts here.

I'm thinking of setting up an account with either Coin Base or Electrum.  Hope I'm not breaking any rules with this comment.

What do you mean accumulated with transaction fees? Because as far as I know, withdrawal fee is somehow the same as a transaction fee because we can consider taking money out of the exchange as a transaction already, then we shouldn't not separate the transactions fees and the withdrawal fees as they both contribute to the increase of market price of cryptocurrency. For example, if we are to create transactions in cryptocurrency, we need to accept that not the entirety of our offer will be delivered exactly how much it should be. And that is because of the transactions fee as well.

accumulated means overall    . there are many kinds of transaction fee and one of them is wd fee  . 

@op it was a year old and the price of btc that time where not same compare to today  so its not good to refer on old post for fees but you need the updated or the current one  .

fees also change depending on the amount or depending on the wallet/platform that you are using  . 

So true. This is one of the most effective and useful innovations. We can determine fees at will, adjusted to our individual needs, can be set sooner or later. The faster the transaction, the higher the fee charged. This is what I like, so fees follow the percentage of funds that we take or send, and based on speed, are very effective. These fees also vary in percentage at each exchange and sometimes some are affected by changes in the price of an altcoin.

Coinbase is an online service&crypto exchange and Electrum is just a desktop/mobile wallet. These are two completely different things, with first you buy/sell crypto and you need to do KYC (Know Your Customer) by verifying your account with the documents you will send to them. On the other hand, Electrum is a wallet that you will download and use for free, without any KYC and with one more most important thing - you will be in full control of your private keys.

I advise you to become familiar with all the concepts and basics before investing in BTC, and especially be careful with fake pages (phishing) which can cause a loss of your funds, by typing your login data to a fake site, or by download fake wallet (Electrum). I advise you to always use AdBlock for your browser, it will block most of the bad sites showed by Google.

You can easily setup an Electrum wallet within minutes because it's a personal wallet and you have control over your wallet and you are responsible to keep your private keys but on Coinbase which is an online wallet which provides service for buying and selling bitcoin. To use coinbase, you will need to go through identity verification and there's also limits with some ridiculous fees especially when bitcoin blockchain gets congested.

I use mycelium. It works great and can scan QR codes. It if very quick to set up and makes backing up your private key easy and you will not forget. The wallet is sigwit I think and I pay right now about $0.50 to send a btc transaction. You install it on your phone and your phone becomes your "hardware wallet" I use it as a wallet to spend and keep my main amount on a ledger nano s.

You're not.

Electrum is a good choice though just make sure that you're downloading from the main website of it because there's a lot of fake websites that are imitating electrum.

https://electrum.org/#home

Ok I like the Electrum wallet because from my limited research it seems one of the more secure wallets.  I could store everything on a USB drive.  Any recommendations on a bitcoin exchange for purchasing Bit Coins?

DO yourself a favor and force it to the smallest possible amount, which is 1 sat/B. Some wallets (but not all) allow you to manually force it a value. After that, do the transfer and wait like a day.

The fee is not really related to the amount, but the number of sources used. If all 500 USD come from a single source, it is something like 100 sats. But if its a few, like 4 or 5, maybe about 500 sats.

I don't do mBTC; but that amount sounds obscenely high. Most people do not need anything more than 1 sat per byte. Ask yourself the question: Can you wait a day? If yes, do it and with a proper wallet, in case of emergency, you can even accelerate it later yourself by adding more money to the fee, something that should almost never occur.

Simply put, the people paying more want it faster, but it is a competition. In the end paying a bit more would very likely give the same result, reduce the time to an hour or so. Not worth in my opinion, i disagree with wallet's current trend of "guessing best" fees, that's the kind of thing that unleashes artificial fee madness, as it creates a domino effect when "something abnormal" happens.

Just wait it out, and don't use Bitcoin for instant transactions, leave that for LN when its time comes. You'll be happier too. Consider banks, wire transfer takes days and even weeks when international. A day or two for a few sats is dirt cheap and "lightning" fast in comparison. Doesn't even need "out of chain" acceleration...

Unfortunately most online wallets, such as those in exchanges or gambling sites, don't let you set the transfer fee and impose you arbitrary rates (in addition to theirs).